Ok, so I’ve been using Open Office ever since it first came out as Star Office. I am a vehement anti-MS office fanatic, to the point that it is completely banned from our office, and everyone I know uses it now instead of MS Office.
I use OO for just about every ‘writing’ task that I come across, from taking notes at meetings, on through writing the thousand-pages documentation manuals for the COTS software that my business sells.
However, it seems that every single time I embark on some kind of large-scale document writing project in Open Office, it finds a way to frak me. I swear that it’s laughing at me sometimes the things that it fucks me over about are so fundamentally stupid.
My biggest issue? Numbering of elements in a document. You know, where a document is supposed to start at 1 and continue from there, theoretically getting larger and larger every time you add an element? Yeah that.
Now I’ve just spent a half-hour google searching for a solution to fixing numbering in Open Office AFTER it fraks you, but I think the engineers at Google are laughing at me as well, because no matter what I search for, Google returns either a completely useless set of results that has absolutely nothing to do with Open Office, let alone Writer, let alone a solution for my problem. Either that, or it returns me a set of shameless articles by authors blathering about how great Open Office is and ‘how could microsoft POSSIBLY not have gone out of business yet?’
Ugh.
So what’s the problem? Perhaps a screenshot or two should suffice.
So, as you can see in the document above (which is of the ‘Navigator’ view of a document, available by pressing ‘F5′ in OOWriter), I have a document that is numbered 1, 1.1, 1.1.1, on up. Now this document is getting upwards of several hundreds of pages by now, as I get further into the writing process.
I typically start a document like this (which is the new GameCore manual if you are curious) by filling out a rough outline of the document as empty entries, and then going back and filling in the content, and potentially additional entries as it gets fleshed out.
The high-level outline entries become heading tags, such as Heading 1, Heading 2, on down. This makes generation of a Table of Contents in OOWriter VERY easy - as long as it works.
At some point in pretty much EVERY document’s lifetime, Open Office decides to completely FRAK me by resetting the counting randomly. In this case, it has completely reset the document count and started the sub-entries I just added back to 1 (they are Heading 3 entries, which is a 3rd level indent - so 1.1.1 in this case).
This issue has persisted so long that it’s almost expected, except that it is so FRAKING ANNOYING.
Now, I’m not saying that the Open Office developers are ignoring the issue - it very well could be the number one ‘about to be fixed’ bug in the system, but I wouldn’t know, because the process of submitting bugs and getting any kind of official response from the OO developers is so convoluted that it just isn’t worth the time bothering to go and find out.
I’ve tried submitting bugs to them before, jumped through the hoops - and gotten the almighty ‘works on my machine, must be something YOU did’ response from them.
The bug in question at the time was with Open Office’s Powerpoint wanna-be, which is 1000x worse than Writer in regards to how badly it fucks you when it wants to.
I mean, I know how difficult software is to develop. I get it. But this (numbering of elements) is supposedly one of THE killer features in Open Office compared to MS Office that makes it SO MUCH BETTER than the MS Suite.
I just don’t get it. The solution? There is none. There is a workaround, which I am forced to take time and time again when working on large documents like this one.
Every Chapter Must be it’s own Document.
Yes, you heard me - every single chapter in a larger body of work must eventually become it’s own document. The reason isn’t because of some kind of limitation on document size in Open Office - it’s because if a document is smaller, there is LESS TO FIX when OOWriter FRAKS you.
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Now, I read articles from time to time about people daring to write things like novels in Open Office. These are very brave people. I realize that writing a novel is different than writing technical documentation - there usually isn’t a whole lot of formatting involved in creating a novel, most of that happens AFTER the writing is done in some kind of program like In Design or whatever.
However, technical writing is an extremely large field, with probably more people writing technical documents than actually writing novels.
Tell me - is there any kind of reasonable alternative? Some kind of software for writing technical manuals that doesn’t cost tens of thousands (or even thousands) of dollars.
